When a robbery hits police headquarters, it’s up to Frank Runtime and his extensive search skills to catch the culprits. In this detective story, you’ll learn how to use algorithmic tools to solve the case. Runtime scours smugglers’ boats with binary search, tails spies with a search tree, escapes a prison with depth-first search, and picks locks with priority queues. Joined by know-it-all rookie Officer Notation and inept tag-along Socks, he follows a series of leads in a best-first search that unravels a deep conspiracy. Each chapter introduces a thrilling twist matched with a new algorithmic concept, ending with a technical recap.

Perfect for computer science students and amateur sleuths alike, The CS Detective adds an entertaining twist to learning algorithms.

The most efficient algorithms to use in a given situation, and when to apply common-sense heuristic methods

Author Bio

Jeremy Kubica is a principal engineer at Google working on machine learning and algorithms. He has a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in computer science from Cornell University. Kubica is the author of the popular Computational Fairy Tales blog.

“I love being able to wrap learning into this story and that it doesn’t seem like learning at all. This book is perfect for computer science students or amateur sleuths who enjoy a good mystery.”
—The Old Schoolhouse

“Good wizards and evil wizards cast spells, which helps capture the interest of students in the upper middle and lower high school grades...The story is worth the time to learn about different binary searches.”
—National Council of Teachers of Mathematics

“I think the book would be good for high school–college level students interested in search algorithms or computer science in general. I enjoyed the book and the refresher on CS topics.”
—404 Tech Support